Different technologies may be appropriate for differ-
ent applications, depending on perceived user profiles,
need to interface with other systems or databases, environmental conditions, and a host of other ap-
plication-specific parameters. However, biometrics
also has some drawbacks and limitations, which lead
to research issues and future directions in this field.
Independent testing of biometric systems shows that
only fingerprinting and iris recognition are capable of
identifying a person on a large scale database. Under same data size, face, voice, and signature recognition are not able to identify individuals accurately. The per- formance of biometric systems decreases with increase in the database size. This is known as scalability, and is a challenge for real time systems.
Another issue is privacy, which is defined as the
freedom from the unauthorized intrusion. Three distinct forms in which it can be divided are:
• Physical privacy, or the freedom of an individual from contact with other.
• Informational privacy, or the freedom of an individual to limit access to certain personal information about oneself.
• Decision privacy, or the freedom of an individual to make private choices about the personal and intimate matters.
Several ethical, social, and law enforcement issues and public resistances related to these challenges are a big deterrent to the widespread use of biometric systems
for indentification.
Another challenging issue in biometrics is to recog-
nize an individual at a remote area. If the verification
takes place across a network (where the measurement point and the access control decision point are not
co-located), the system might be insecure. In such cases, the attacker can either steal the person’s scanned characteristic and use it during other transactions, or inject his characteristic into the communication channel. This problem can be overcome by the use of a secure channel between the two points, or using the security techniques, such as cancellable biometrics, biometric watermarking, cryptography, and hashing.
Another major challenge is interoperability of differ-
ent devices and algorithms. For example, a fingerprint
image scanned using a capacitive scanner cannot be
processed with the algorithm which is trained on fin- gerprints obtained from an optical scanner. This is an important research issue and can be addressed using standard data sharing protocols, which is currently underway.
Other research issues in biometrics include incor- porating data quality with the recognition performance, multimodal biometric fusion with uncertain, ambigu-
ous, and conflicting sources of information, designing
advanced and sophisticated scanning devices, and searching for new biometric features, and evaluating its individuality.
conclusIon
The world would be a fantastic place if everything were secure and trusted. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is fraud, crime, computer hackers, and thieves. So, there is a need of security applications to ensure users’ safety. Biometrics is one of the methods which can provide security to users with the limited available resources. Some of its ongoing and future applications are physical access, virtual access, e-commerce appli-
cations, corporate IT, aviation, banking and financial,
healthcare, and government. This paper presents an
overview of various aspects of biometrics, and briefly
describes the components and characteristics of bio- metric systems. Further, we also described unimodal and multimodal biometrics, performance evaluation techniques, research issues, and future directions.
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key terms
Authentication: The action of verifying information such as identity, ownership, or authorization.
Behavioral Biometric: Biometric that is char- acterized by a behavioral trait learned and acquired over time.
Biometric: A measurable, physical characteristic, or personal behavioral trait used to recognize or verify the claimed identity of an enrollee.
Biometrics: The automated technique of measur- ing a physical characteristic or personal trait of an individual, and comparing that characteristic to a com-
prehensive database for purposes of identification. Physical/Physiological Biometric: Biometric that is characterized by a physical characteristic.
False Acceptance Rate: The probability that a bio- metric system will incorrectly identify an individual, or will fail to reject an impostor.
False Rejection Rate: The probability that a bio- metric system will fail to identify an enrollee, or verify the legitimate claimed identity of an enrollee.
Multimodal Biometrics: A system which uses multiple biometric information of an individual for authentication.